NEW ORLEANS - Japanese
children who had seizures during a “Pokemon” cartoon in
1997 have generally not had another one unless they
already had epilepsy, researchers say.

The TV show sent at least 685 Japanese viewers, mostly
children, to emergency rooms with symptoms ranging from
nausea and hyperventilation to convulsions. They were
apparently made sick by a scene with extremely rapid
flashes of red and blue.

To find out whether the
incident had any lasting effects, Dr. Akihisa Okumura
and colleagues in Nagoya sent questionnaires to doctors
who had treated 103 “Pokemon” patients in the
prefecture, or state, of Aichi. They got back results
for 91 patients.

Twenty-five had had at least
one more convulsion in the five years since the
“Pokemon” episode. They were divided almost evenly
between those diagnosed with epilepsy and those who
weren’t. However, electroencephalograms revealed that 10
of the 13 who had not been diagnosed with epilepsy did,
in fact, have the disease.

His findings were published as
a letter to the editor in Thursday’s New England Journal
of Medicine.

“That’s very much what I would
have expected,” said Dr. Donald M. Olson, director of
pediatric epilepsy at Stanford University’s Lucille
Packard Children’s Hospital.

“A lot of us may have a genetic
predisposition to epilepsy but never have a seizure in
their lives,” he said. “This is just one of those
unusual occurrences where a specific trigger — this kind
of flashing screen — provoked seizures in people who
might not otherwise have had them.”

Olson said the risk of TVs,
video games and computers triggering a seizure is
extremely low for children who have not already had
seizures.

The incident in Japan was by
far the largest in which seizures have been traced to a
TV broadcast.